To get a good feel of how Amy talks, coaches, and strategizes on business development, please listen to her podcast with industry leader Michael Kitces on this link. This interview will give you all you need to know on how Amy grew her own practice, and how she can help yours.

What will the coaching structure look like?

While we maintain a curriculum around the topics we want to teach you, we are big believers in action not theory. Therefore, the majority of the time, our conversations will be in real time, discussing client and prospect opportunities that need strategizing and immediate attention. We will discuss topics like email writing strategies, client communication around referrals, researching a prospect, social media best practices, how to find new opportunities at events, and a lot more.

What have been the results from the sales coaching?

The most common way to measure the effectiveness of your sales coaching experience is to start with where your main challenges are, and how you can conquer them. Success will depend on how open a student is to the coach's recommendations and advice. We also keep very accurate records of both individual as well as group performance (if working with larger teams) and compare those across the entire firm against set standards or expectations.

Another equally important factor to measure success is a cultural shift within organizations, when our program moves sales to the front burner of most decisions within a practice. When water cooler discussions start circling more around sales opportunities, and advisors have developed a keen focus on networking and closing, we know we have been doing our job right!

At Select Advisors, we have seen advisors achieve whatever goals they wanted, if they were willing to be open-minded, open to new ideas and suggestions, and follow our advice. We have seen advisors bring in $10mm opportunities within the first two months of working with us, increase their pipeline by $65mm within one month, or double their lead conversion rate. We have also seen advisors not grow at all, particularly if they are one foot in, one foot out, and traveling 50% of the year for leisure, as they see their practice as a lifestyle business.

I'm the CEO of my firm, and don't know who to select for this sales coaching program. Do you have any suggestions?

Research shows that coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong professionals.

Few managers can resist the lure of reliving their glory days by passing along their wisdom to the one or two professionals who remind them most of their younger selves. To combat managers’ tendency to coach just laggards and leaders, companies implement elaborate systems to allocate coaching equally across the sales force. They imagine that “all boats will rise” as a result.

According to a Harvard Business Review article, research involving thousands of sales professionals found that coaching — even world-class coaching — has a marginal impact on either the weakest or the strongest performers in the sales organization.

The conclusion? The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% — either core performers at large organizations, or smaller firms growing at an average rate compared to industry standards. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19%. In fact, even moderate improvement in coaching quality — simply from below to above average — can mean a six to eight percent increase in performance across 50% of your sales force. Often as not, that makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.